They're right in that it definitely should be a good goal in beginning with something small. After all, the game is open source, there may be little incentive for people to actually buy the game when they can just download the source and build it for themselves for free, which we are perfectly fine with.

The goal of seeing if monetization through Steam is possible is to offset the potential costs of networking infrastructure, not necessarily to turn a profit. If passing a revenue threshold would suddenly reintroduce or amplify our existing costs, there's no reason to pursue it.

Right now, we have a basic netplay system built upon UPNP and just connecting to players by directly using IP/Port. This works well for a small community where you can just dump the information through a chat like IRC or Discord. However, we would like to offer a better netplay experience through relay servers and potentially a matchmaking service. Whether we take a managed solution (i.e. Unity's or Photon's) or roll our own, the costs to run these servers cannot be ignored. Hence why we are cautiously checking this ahead of time. If the outcome of this discussion is unfavorable for our situation, we may consider moving off of Unity as a platform.

The unity licence sucks for this sort of collaboration. As written, all contributors to a project need to be on the same licence level. Apparently Unity is working in an update, but thy have been aware of the issue for years and haven't come up with a solution yet.

In practice just make sure you comply with your required license level, and let everybody else in the project take care of their own.

A hacky way around this is to make your array static instead of an instance variable. Since Unity isn't threaded it's OK to share access to this but you have to remember that you're not the only one using it, so expect the contents to be mangled between frames.

I think the ArrayPool solution works more effectively for several reasons.

The pool shares the arrays between different operations (i.e. raycast for one object, return the array, re-use it for a spherecast elsewhere), so fewer arrays in general are allocated for the same type.

By wrapping the initialization of the array as a part of the function call that uses it, you do not allocate anything until you call the function, and do not need to add explicit initialization checks if the array is used in different functions, it's all handled by the Rent method of the pool.

While normal Unity APIs are not thread-safe, the pool is. This could be useful for things like sharing byte array buffers for serializing/deserializing network messages in background threads.

Finally the array memory is automatically released by the GC if the pool has over-allocated. You need to explicitly manage releasing that memory tied to the static variable, which is one more thing that the consumer of the array needs to manage.

Generally speaking, this should be a "premium" level event, where you either submit your best or push beyond that. You've been given a seven month notice, so take the time to polish up and give it your all. In general, IMO submissions should generally be a bit higher quality than the normal stuff submitted to the sub.

There's not been too much public updates as of recent, at least not on the mainline repo. I got super fed up with a lot of the old code and decided to rewrite it from scratch in a new repo. Making rapid progress, but nothing worth showing yet. I have gotten basically everything basic working already. Once I have networked games working and players can properly bash each other's faces in. I'll push it up and make it open for the public to test out. Progress is still public here: https://github.com/HouraiTeahouse/FantasyCrescendoRedux

Big changes will include rollback-based netplay, something I have been painfully trying to get working in the old system, but couldn't, as well as moddability: all characters and stages are effectively mods loaded dynamically at runtime. Other than that, a much more flexible codebase and w much more heavily unit tested one. Making a conscious effort to make sure bugs don't pop up and stay down when fixed with this new implementation.

The rest of the team is also working along. As evidenced by this post.

Hecatia Lapislazuli of Touhou. Goddess of Hell. The joke here is that she exists simultaneously on Earth, the Moon, and the Otherworlds, represented by the three spheres she's bound to, with Earth being the blue one.

It's the base game logic loop. Every Unity system, including user-space scripts are executed through it: animation, sound, video, rendering, etc. From what is shown from the documentation, it seems like you can modify the order of system calls within the loop, enable/disable entire Unity engine (i.e. disable 2D physics if you are only using 3D), and potentially add your own game systems that run outside of the context of usual Unity objects (GameObjects/MonoBehaviours/ScriptableObjects).

Up until now, this main loop was fixed, uncontrollable by user-space scripts, and closed source.

thcrap operates by directly manipulating fixed memory locations in an executing copy of Touhou. If the memory addresses change or are dynamically allocated, the patch doesn't work, or straight up causes undefined behavior.

The previous, baked-in, patches manipulate the files on disk before they are read into memory, so the memory allocation strategy doesn't matter.

Anything that actively alters the runtime memory or the at-rest state of executable files, especially if the modifying binary is not code-signed (like THCRAP), is very likely to trigger anti-malware software. This is true even for game patching software: it's difficult to deduce the intent of a modification to a executable. Blizzard, Riot, Steam, etc all need to get their binaries whitelisted by anti-malware software. thcrap obviously doesn't have the financial clout to do this, so the binaries they have are unsigned and un-whitelisted, and to a malware detector, that looks just like a virus.

/u/muffinpimp, the guy running thcrap, can probably vouch for it's validity, but otherwise you'll just have to trust the thcrap devs not to maliciously alter the game.

I was browsing twitter when I saw this set of tweets pop up in my feed. I thought it'd be good to discuss here, especially given how we've been trying to foster and support a creator space here with events like Redditaisai, OC submission rules, etc.

While this experience is entirely anecdotal, it is incredibly interesting to hear about, especially if it's representative of a larger trend in the fanbase itself. I've always loved the content creator aspect of this community (even if it isn't necessarily unique to Touhou), and so I think the key to any sort of community's longevity is having invested community members that give back in some way.

Supporting the originals is great - in this case, directly giving ZUN our money - but I think with the way he set up the Touhou doujin guidelines he was always mindful that it could be something more. A community is made up of individuals, after all - and each creator, with their individual take on things, can contribute to the greater corpus of work that makes Touhou (and other communities like it) what it is.

As I've said in the past regarding the rule changes and Redditaisai, fostering a creative community that contributes back is an investment in the future of the fanbase. This is especially true as the recent years, since 2010-2012, have been a large global growth, not just within Japan. Transitioning the west, a largely consumer fanbase, to one that encourages and fosters growing creators is vital to the community's future.

This is very evident from other very long-standing fanbases. A key example is the fanbases of western superhero comics. Marvel and DC's works has lasted for decades. Their works often inspire young fans to pick up drawing, many of which start making their own derivative works or original comics: some even go and get hired by Marvel or DC to draw the next generation of comics. It's a virtuous cycle that benefits everyone, but it's not something that is easily achieved: people need to put an active effort to move towards it, and not just sitting idle mindlessly consuming the works of others.

But as discussed in the original tweets, Touhou's longevity rests on how many of these kids will go from just being consumers to being creators themselves. This is why I think it's very important to emphasize how new content is being produced even today by particular, individual creators, and not just advertise Touhou fanworks as appearing from the void or being made by a nameless collective like "the doujin machine" or "the Japanese internet"!

If we do move off of this site and need to change the name, we could always just rename the event after the color of the /r/touhou sidebar: "Reditaisai." On the other hand, it might be good to clarify that it's a western event, so perhaps it might be better to have a name like "Occidentaisai." Perhaps a name that could symbolize the growth of touhou beyond its japanese origins like "Spreadtaisai" could work. If we wanted to emphasize the violence inherent in the western world with genres like zombie movies, we could even name it "slaytaisai", but a name should probably clarify that you're meant to post your own works created elsewhere with "Embedtaisai", or even "Displaytaisai".

A previous comment by /u/iceerules also mentions avoiding usage of Reitaisai's naming as well for trademark issues. We're not associated with them at all, no reason to link ourselves to it.

Something like Hakurei Expo is very neutral in this regard and is a clean slate to impress upon others. Either it or something similar to it would be best suited for such an event: Slaytaisai just sounds cheesy.

There is one big reason to keep a similar name, and that's name awareness. We've done this for two years, so a lot of the community has already heard about the event with this name. We'd lose a lot of that brand-name recognition if we changed the name too far.

I would like to address some of the comments made by respondents on the survey, as well as discuss the option of moving off of Reddit as a whole. Here's is good as any, since we can discuss it openly here. I will be updating this as more common comments come up.

The display if you will. It would be nice to have one big catalog for certain things like Music, videos, artwork, and games. Having a lot of submissions is awesome, but sifting through them all can be tricky.

The lack of categorization is a common complaint I'm seeing. Just so everyone knows. The tables on Reddit posts allow you to sort by column. This includes the category column. If this wasn't apparent from the get go, I'll make a comment about it next year on the catalogue post if we are still holding the event on Reddit.

This is more of a nitpick in the entries, but I felt there was too much musical submissions and not enough videos or fangames.

this isn't really a criticism but i hope in the future i'll get to see even more collabs/multi-person circle works!

While we can promote and encourage people to submit things, we can't control what kind of content people submit. Be the change you want to see.

Perhaps a heads up a day or two in advanced about the event, I didn't actually know it was going until the day it started, and I browse r/touhou regularly.

The signup thread was stickied for a full 4 months leading up to the event. I'm not sure how to make it easier for redditors to find out beyond putting the date directly into the title of the stickied post itself.

Redditaisai spreadsheet "Submission name" had not been updated

That's my bad. I had my own submission to worry about and forgot to match up the catalogue name with the post's names. Hopefully we can handle this in an automated fashion next year.

Missing Links in the Sticky Thread because of the Koakuma Bot not taking any links if the Redditor who uploaded its work didnt provide a link / or added a link inside a text submission.

The entire event was 24 hours long, and I got to sleep. Will probably be solved via automation next year if we expect even more growth.

Poorly categorized, biased towards early bird and catchy thumbnails

I think that, maybe, timezones can help or not your submission, since European hours seem to be much more quiet.

I feel like the "Uploading at noon" is a good idea, but I think it will obscure certain works given how Reddit works and the timezones.

The idea of spacing people's posts across time zones was a good one, but suffered from the bias of Reddit's algorithms. An argument for moving off of reddit, I guess.

It would be great if it is not just an event for reddit community, but for Western Touhou community in general. A Westaisai would be something I dream for.

Publicity, I think - I'm not aware of any other Touhou communities spreading word/discussing the event

promotion, literally never heard about it till now.

The event originally was intended for the reddit community, but clearly we're starting to grow a little big for that with people from other communities looking to join in.

With all that said, there's a mixed reaction of wanting to move off of Reddit, at time of writing it's about a 50/50 split.

Another small comment I would like to make about moving off of Reddit: Reddtiaisai's name must change. Continuing to keep reddit in it's name would be borderline trademark infringement. We'd need a new event name. I'm open to suggestions on this one: Westaisai was suggested, but I'm not exactly too keen on it.

If next year's will be held on its own site, then that site should be easily accessible from the r/Touhou front page.

If the final decision is to move the event onto an independent platform, then I think the name should just be completely original.

To add on to the trademark infringement, it's probably not the best idea to attempt to associate the event on something preexisting such as Reitaisai, especially if we have no actual connection to the planners for that event.

I think something as simple as Touhou Cultural Festival.NET would be great for the event. It gets the point across and can be weeb-ed up if that's how you roll.

It's certainly hard to come up with something that rolls of the tongue as easily.

The vote is basically 50/50 right now, and hasn't changed. Though it seems like the people who actually have submitted something overwhelmingly support moving off of reddit. May just go with something simple like Hakurei Expo (RX) or something.